Background
Breast cancer is a very personal topic for me since my friend Carolina was diagnosed with it back in january 2016. Being with her allowed me to recognize the pain points that family, friends and the patient can go through during this journey.
- Let’s keep in mind that breast cancer has become the leading cause of cancer death among women.
- This is a disease that only in 2018 affected over two million people in the entire world.
- It is the second most common cancer overall
Case Studies
So First I started doing some research on case studies to see if there were services that were addressing this specific problem I categorized the case studies, to improve the analisis.
The categorization was based on :
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1. If they were physical or digital projects
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2. In which phase of the disease they were focused on
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3. If it involved a community or just one person
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4. And if it was about healthcare or wellness
At the end I found that many of the projects were mainly digital, focused on the diagnosis phase or when these women had finished their treatment. Very few pretended to create a connection patient to patient. They didn't intend to create community among them and prefered to highlight the importance of healthcare beyond wellness.
What do I want to make out of this project with this information?
So with this in mind I decided what I wanted to make of this project
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1. I wanted it to be digital but also to encourage connections in real life
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2. Involve the During, finalization and After stages of the illness.
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3. I want to create community
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4. Allow them to acquire information about healthcare but also about wellness
HOW MIGHT WE HELP FIRST TIME BREAST CANCER PATIENTS FIND AND HELP EACH OTHER DURING THE ENTIRE ILLNESS, IN ORDER TO CREATE A SUPPORT COMMUNITY THAT HELPS THEM SOFTEN THE BURDENS THAT COME WITH BREAST CANCER?
Co-Design Session
I made a codesign session and interviews with women that had been through breast cancer.
The aim was to confirm that the path chosen from the previous research was the right one. Even though a concrete idea hadn’t been created, there were possible scenarios
Scenarios
- I’ve got your back : Which is about providing emotional support
- Two heads work better than one: Which is about showing support through everyday actions
- Move along: This scenario is about reminding these women that breast cancer doesn’t define them, find other alternatives to distract their mind.
With the codesign session the main activity was to display possible solutions for women going through breast cancer and let them pick the ones they believed were best, merge them, even create new solutions if they believed it was necessary. At the end only three ideas could remain out of 12.
At the end the results of the co-design session were:
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A merge between the idea of creating a network of godmothers (women that in the past had breast cancer) to give support to women that have just found out they have the disease with a friendship tinder for women that have just started their journey with breast cancer and want to find more in the same situation.
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Workshops by/for women with breast cancer to give each other support WITH dinners and food events to meet other women in the same situation.
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And finally a cleaning service for women with breast cancer, since many of them live alone and the treatment is too strong for them to handle the house tasks.
How are all these results connected with the 4 aims that I mentioned before?
First I realized that only the first and second ideas, result of the co design session, supported these 4 aims.
The cleaning service was a good idea but hard to accomplish in Colombia, lack of trust and time were the main reasons to not support this possibility.
Also the interviews mention how it becomes natural after a while to meet a digital connection face to face. They confirmed that the times where they looked for advice from others was when they were in the middle of the treatment. Also mentioned the importance of having people that could understand their fears anxiety and the disease.
Final idea
An app that helps breast cancer patients and survivors to connect and help each other, but also their friends and family, since they are part of their support system.
With this app It was important to stop calling these women “patients”, they had mentioned how this word made them feel less human, so that’s why I thought about the metaphor of voyage :
Which means a long journey involving travel by sea.
These women know what their goal is which is “Be cancer free” , they just don’t know when they are going to get there, not even if they will.there is no more struggle than trying to keep themselves on float.
How would this service work?
- First, there will be alliances between the hospitals, more specifically the oncology units and Voyage, so the information about the new app can be displayed, and warriors can be informed about this new possibility to create a network of support.
- The users will have to enter personal data including how they describe themselves at this moment, meaning warriors, survivors or godmothers
- Guardians will be optional and can only enter Voyage if they are being invited by a warrior. In Voyage, Guardians can ask questions to the community, get advice from women going through cancer and follow the journey of their loved ones.
- Also users will select who they are looking for…. In the case of warriors, could be more women in their same situation, could be godmothers or even both.
- Each one of the users will have to insert data like type of cancer, hospital where being treated, doctor, profession and interests. These will be the points of connection to create the algorithm that will connect later godmothers, warriors and survivors.
- After they fill all their information, they can browse the profiles of the users they want to connect, in this case godmothers. The connection is voluntary and can only happen if both parts want to meet each other.
- After a connection is made, godmothers have 48hs to send an introductory and personal video to the warrior in order to initiate a conversation and eventually translate it to real life.
- The service providers like small shops and cafes will be part of the platform offering to warriors and godmothers a nice place to meet for the first time.
- After the encounter, both users will do a survey to know how the meeting was, if it met their expectations and finally leave a positive comment to the other.
- Users can also connect with the community of Voyage in the discover section called Message in a bottle. Here, every month Voyage will ask the entire community a question related to their journey so they can answer it through a video if they decide to participate.
- They can also discover more users and the previous messages in a bottle and participate in the discussion board to solve any doubt they have.
- Godmothers will also have the possibility to create workshops or moments of gathering for warriors and survivors after 5 successful meetings, all depending on their skills and the approach they believe could work during this time in their lives. They can set the date, time, location and offer to who.
Details
Voyage is an app that helps breast cancer patients and survivors to connect and help each other, but also their friends and family, since they are part of their support system.
